Many people start a website and think it will immediately appear on every search engine that is available on the web. Those of you who are reading this and who are really familiar with the world of the web are probably suppressing a giggle right now (or the mean ones blatantly laughing out loud), but those of you who are not so familiar will be sitting there in shock, thinking “you mean that’s not how it works?”.

So what is a Keyword?

You have to think of search engines as telephone directories. With telephone directories, you search for a specific name and a list of everyone with that surname will come up. Keywords are like surnames in a telephone book.

If you own a website and you want people to find you, you need to put yourself in their shoes and wonder how they would look for what you have to offer without knowing that you exist. For instance, you sell high heeled shoes for women with big shoe sizes. The keyword (which is, more often than not, a sentence) for your website could be “large size high heeled shoes”.

How Do You Use Keywords?

You need to ensure that your keywords appear in a lot of places on your website. Preferably in the title and quite densely placed in any text you have on your site. Make sure you also put your keywords in the meta-tag.

Keyword Statistics

There are millions and millions of pages on the internet so you can guess that there will probably be someone out there who is already using the same keywords as you. It is difficult to achieve the top place on the search results of a search engine, but getting on the first page is relatively easy. One way to do this is to make sure you are not using the same keywords as everybody else. Looking up keyword statistics is a great way to achieve this. On the other hand, it is important to also use the most frequent keywords as this will mean people will be more likely to find your website. It is a complicated balancing act of being original and predictable at the same time but with time webmasters master it for their niche and so so will you.

Keyword statistics can be looked up through Google, WordPress and many other online sites and tools available. The top 10 keywords vary on a day to day basis, but the overall top 10 keywords are:

Facebook

Facebook login

YouTube

Craigslist

MySpace

Facebook.com

eBay

Yahoo

www.facebook.com

Mapquest

This shows you that many people search for things that have to do with social networking and is an important clue towards determining what your website needs: a link to social networking sites. If you also advertise this fact in some of the text on your site, you will already be one step closer towards climbing the ladder of search engine pages.

As you can see, keywords are an important tool to help you attract visitors to your website. Keep using the telephone book analogy: nobody would be able to find your number if you weren’t registered in the telephone book, would they?